Artists from ’90s ‘Mission School’ together again
Alicia McCarthy first painted a woven grid on a square piece of plywood she found on the street in the Mission District in the 1990s.
Using her tiniest paintbrush, she first drew a thin line from side to side on the panel. By the time she finished, the block of wood was covered with horizontal and interweaving lines. She did not title it and gave it to a friend nicknamed Shanna Banana.
Twenty years later, the maze-like weave is McCarthy’s signature painting style. It has had gallery shows in San Francisco and New York. Both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Oakland Museum of California own McCarthy’s paintings, and an 18-foot-square weave is on the wall at the central stairway at San Francisco Art Institute at Fort Mason.
“All of the work is like a slow train, picking up cars along the journey,” said McCarthy, who now has five fresh paintings plus a wall mural on display at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Just one of the five paintings is a full-color weave like the original.
“You can’t put two in a room together or they start fighting with each other,” she says from her studio in Oakland.
But there is still fighting to be done in the room because McCarthy’s five abstract line paintings share the gallery with five large pots glazed in the female form by Ruby Neri, a Los Angeles artist who is the daughter of painter and sculptor Manuel Neri, part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
The exhibition is titled “Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri/Matrix 270,” but it is not a collaboration. In the
gallery their art looks incongruous, but to McCarthy it makes perfect sense.
“It is our approach to our own individual materials that connects the work,” she says. “I don’t know why it works, but it does.”
McCarthy and Neri were born in Oakland less than a year apart. They met as undergraduates at San Francisco Art Institute in 1990 and became so close that they painted on each other’s canvases.
They also lived together in a $700 three-bedroom apartment with a fellow student, photographer Spencer Maynard Mack.
The three were central to what has come to be known as “The Mission School,” a glorious moment that had more than two dozen artists, all in their 20s, working in dance, punk rock, graffiti, painting, underground comics, street art and any other media that made the Mission what it was in the ’90s.
The dot-com boom scattered the “Mission School” before the name was even coined. Neri moved to Hollywood to get her MFA from UCLA, and McCarthy moved to Oakland and got her MFA from UC Berkeley.
McCarthy went on to be named a Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art 2017 winner at SFMOMA. Neri’s work is in the the collection of the Hammer Museum at UCLA.
They had neither worked nor shown their pieces together for about 15 years when they were reunited by the Matrix program at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary of showcasing leading voices in contemporary art.
“Alicia and Ruby are legendary figures specific to what was happening in San Francisco in the 1990s,” said
Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri/Matrix 270:
11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Through Aug. 26. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St. Berkeley. 510-642-0808. bampfa.org exhibition curator Apsara Diquinzio. “Their aesthetic was rooted in graffiti, and I wanted to put them in dialogue again, to see what would emerge now.”
McCarthy and Neri make up the 270th exhibition in the Matrix series. The show runs through Aug. 26 and includes a limited-edition poster and the wall mural by McCarthy.
“I’m always surprised when people ask me to participate in anything,” she says. “To do it with Ruby was the best part of it. I’m excited just to be in a room alone with her.”
As the weave paintings have become identifiable as McCarthy collectibles, she has heard of them being found at the dump and on the street. The original that she gave to Shanna Banana has made its way to Munich where she now lives.
And while McCarthy is sentimental about her friends, she isn’t with her work.
“Once it leaves my studio, it is on its own life track,” she said. Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@ sfchronicle.com. Instagram: sfchronicle_art